


woman, scorning

by bittybelle



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Deadlock Gang, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-06 06:11:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17340047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittybelle/pseuds/bittybelle
Summary: “You’re too spoiled for me,” he’d tease. “I don’t go for rich girls.”Ashe would rather die than wait around for some idiot cowboy in a pompous belt buckle. Mostly.





	woman, scorning

She keeps Friday nights to herself. She used to go out. Not much for clubs, but she’d walk out into the desert and do whatever the hell she wanted. Shoot at bottles, like she used to. Up the ante until she was doing it upside down, legs locked around the curled arm of a saguaro. Drunk, sometimes, but not often. 

 

Or she’d just wander, blasting a favorite song from her tablet’s shitty little speakers, kicking up dust and letting it turn her hair red. The guys’d tease, ask who she’d rolled around with, and she’d let them. It was easier than letting them know the whole truth, which was often that she’d spent four to seven hours hollering out her favorite show tunes and  stumbling through whatever she could remember from Madame Maddie’s lessons. Back when her parents had been paying for everything, trying to decide between Little Baby Ballerina, Banker, or Botanist. She’d hated money she couldn’t touch, hadn’t the patience for plants. But she still thinks she might have made one hell of dancer.

 

That was then. That was her twenties. Now, as forty crests her horizon--and she’s enjoying it so far, loving how much less she feels like she has anything to prove--she stays in. Reads a lot, a little of everything. Trashy romance, birdwatcher’s guides. A book on spy planes she’d seen B.O.B. perusing. The only way in which she’s become her mother is how much she loves doing it with an absurdly expensive cream on her face, too good to be called cream, in actual fact: they’re serums now, or “elixirs.” Whatever. She knows it’s not better than the dimestore grease she used to use, but damn if it doesn’t feel good to see those pretty little bottles lined up beside her Viper. She’s never denied herself aesthetics, and beyond that, she’s not an idiot. She knows it matters for a woman in her position to look a certain way.

 

Jesse used to spend Fridays with her, sometimes. There was a time when they played a lot of cards. Gin rummy, mostly. And then the period with the game that hooked up to the holoboard, with cards you had to slap down in a precise order. She’d been terrible at it; Jesse had been prodigal. She’d put an end to that one by knocking the board aside and wrapping her legs around his neck. He’d not surrender for less, and he’d still insist on telling her afterward, her panties wrapped around his wrist like a battle favor, that he’d have won if not for her “dirty tactics.”

 

“You didn’t seem to mind,” she’d murmur, smile half-pressed into the pillow.

 

“I’m easy, sweetness.” He’d smile lazily, feline. She’d always felt like the dog to his cat, the vigorous, flinty-eyed greyhound to his slinking tom. The animal with a job to do. “I don’t pretend otherwise.”

 

\---

 

She doesn’t see him for a year. Then she sees him for ten minutes, in an alley between a convenience store and a check cashing joint, both grilled for the night. He’s got a black eye and everything she’d thought of saying, doing, leaves her like a flock of hungry birds. She hasn’t even got their feathers. She’s alone, with only her coach gun, knowing she’s in the middle of a heist gone sour, and Jesse’s there, suddenly, hurt and beautiful and one year older that she wasn’t there to see.

 

“Hey,” she says, stupidly.

 

He mouths something. She thinks maybe it was her name. She can’t recall the precise movements after, whether she’d recognized the wide-mouthed monosyllable of “Ashe” or the brittle sequence of “Elizabeth.” Never Lizzie. That was an order. Ashe or Elizabeth and only ever the second one once, when they’d both been high as the monkeys on the moon.

 

Then he was gone. And she didn’t see him for ten more years.

 

\---

 

The first time she sees his picture in the paper, she slams it down.

 

The second time she uses it for target practice. 

 

The third time too.

 

The fourth time doesn’t come, because she tells B.O.B. to make sure she never sees his face in print again. Because she’d keep shooting it. And she needs the gang to think she’s past that.

 

\---

 

She keeps waiting to be past it.

 

\---

 

She makes now work. That’s what she’s always done. She’d known her great-grandmother for a time, a woman who grew up so poor she never stopped shoving cash into coffee cans that she buried in the backyard--even once she had multiple backyards to choose from. She’d loved her, and she’d never forgotten what she’d told her, over and over again, the anxious edge in her voice grown sharp from age and the disappointment of her progeny.

 

“Elizabeth,” she’d said, “you make now work, because you’ll never be rid of it.”

 

So Jesse’s gone. And he stays gone. And she makes the gang greater and grander and greedier. No one goes hungry. No one goes cold. She leaves a bucket of diamonds on Tillie’s aunt’s steps, the one with the problem that makes her joints go so stiff and hot she can’t bear the weight of a blanket. She stares down Russian bosses with Omnics so advanced, their faces are sculpted out of light. She makes them double their prices and she makes them stay three hours later than they’d planned. Then she treats them to the finest American whiskey, and sends Texas bluebonnets to their mothers back in Wherever-The-Hell Oblast. She is merciless and she is benevolent and she goes to bed knowing she will die powerful in a world beyond her great-grandmother’s imagination.

 

\---

 

Mostly she just wants to fuck him again.

 

\---

 

Maybe turn to him after, the lightning strikes of stretch marks laid bare to him on her breasts and belly--just age, but maybe she’d let him believe otherwise. Let him squirm a little, think there’s some brown-haired cowgirl squirreled away in a back room somewhere she never told him about, dying to meet her daddy.

 

\---

 

She worries that all she’d do is hold him.

 

\---

  
  


He used to tease her in bed. “You’re too spoiled for me,” he’d say. “I don’t go for rich girls.”

 

“Ain’t rich anymore.”

 

“You don’t stop being rich. Even without money.”

 

“And you never stopped being an idiot farm boy.”

 

She keeps the details to herself. No one in her gang is likely to cry for a childhood spent on parquet floors and thousand-count sheets, even if it was as quiet and friendless as the grave. But she is glad forever that it taught her to expect the best and to believe she’s worth it.

 

Now she watches him in video clips, doing what’s been designated as the right thing, and she wonders if that arrogance saved her from bullshit like that.

 

\---

 

How could she have ever thought it’d end up as anything but a fight? She watches him roar off into the desert on her bike and feels nothing like a legendary outlaw, a gang’s ruthless queen, a woman as comfortable digging a bullet out of a man’s flesh as appreciating the lesser-known work of George Gershwin. She’s a fucking idiot who thought about kisses and slaps, at most, instead of what was always going to happen: some bullshit posturing and one of them tied up on a hover dolly, waiting for the law.

 

She’s activated her emergency signal; the girl she’s training to be their new medic will find them before anyone else does. But he’s got her bike and her pride and that photo she never did take off the speedometer.

 

She pictures him looking at it, realizing what it means. That it’s there. That it’s there still. What kind of moron she must take him for. She doesn’t feel small, suddenly, she feels a towering rage. She shouts his name into the wind, throws an almighty tantrum she’ll feel stupid about the next day.

 

Fuck him.  _ Fuck _ him. Fuck his turn to what he thinks is right but really isn’t anything but easy, fuck whatever the hell kind of super-advanced bullshit was in the crate, fuck his stupid cigars that smell like the bottom of a knockoff purse, and fuck his stupid, shit-eating grin.

 

The girl gets there early. She doesn’t say anything about the eyeliner smeared down Ashe’s cheeks like an idiot prom queen. She’s going to make an incredible doctor someday.

 

\---

 

Three months later, she wakes up at dawn. She likes to get up early, make her own coffee, get the lay of the land.

 

Her bike is waiting outside her door.

 

He left the photo alone.


End file.
